1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system and a method for managing a contact center. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention provide a system and a method for handling service levels of a contact center.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are client or operator-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Normally, in present-day ACDs when the ACD system's controller detects an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority, oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. Generally, the only condition that results in a contact not being delivered to an available agent is where there are no contacts waiting to be handled.
The primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency. Further, every contact center has supervisors, who are responsible for ensuring consistent performance of the contact center. Typically, a supervisor manages a team of 8-15 agents. The supervisors are trained to handle normal call traffic. Therefore, if there is a sudden burst of activities in a contact center, i.e., all agents of that contact center gets busy in handling their callers/customers and there are a lot of requests still coming to the contact center, then it is expected from the supervisor to manage the situation. Further, the supervisor is required to calculate potential consequences, the best course of action, and the response time. These are complex and potentially error prone calculations that are made on the fly by the supervisor.
Additionally, to manage every unexpected situation, the supervisor of the contact center needs to have a good knowledge about the skills of the agents. Therefore, everything is reliant on knowledge of the supervisor. Moreover, the supervisor needs to process a lot of information manually, which brings a lot of stress. The stress may distract the supervisor, leading him/her to take erroneous decisions. However, it is responsibility of the supervisor to take correct and smart decisions and to guide the agents correctly for maintaining contact center performance.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that is capable of handling service levels of a contact center at all times and further capable of assisting supervisor of the contact center to ensure performance and profit for the contact center.